Apparently, someone at Twitter thought it would be a good idea to plaster advertising on top of iPhone users’ Twitter feeds. (Disclosure: I do not own an iPhone or an iPad, luckily, so I was spared from the #dickbar.) As depicted above, the so-called #dickbar is a strip across the top of the Twitter app’s timeline showing trending topics and advertisements.

Daring Fireball’s John Gruber, however, was not so lucky, and was forced to actually revert to a previous version of the software to rid himself of the offending feature. Perhaps inadvertently, he spawned a meme.

This incident, while mildly amusing, underscores the fundamental challenge that Twitter faces commercially: how to get advertising in front of users’ eyeballs while preserving the uncluttered stream of Tweets that users have grown accustomed to.

NYU Visiting Scholar and internet legend Dave Winer made an interesting point about how “dickbar” is an “eastcoastism,” given that Gruber is a Philadelphia native who roots for the New York Yankees — an interesting concept in and of itself.

Gruber came back and said he wasn’t even conscious of the fact that he had uttered an eastcoastism, because, “I’ve lived my entire life on the east coast, and that’s just how I talk. Winer picks up on these things because he’s a native New Yorker but spent a long time living in the Bay Area.”

(It’s an interesting linguistic-anthropological point: Gruber doesn’t realize he sounds like an east coaster, because he’s lived here his whole life, whereas Winer, an east coaster who lived for a long time on the west coast, can hear it, because he’s had the benefit of distance and perspective.)

But I digress. There’s no need to turn #dickbar into an east coast-west coast thing. Wasn’t Tupac vs. Biggie enough?

Gruber said he wasn’t even referring to Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, a Chicagoan, but just felt that Twitter’s introduction of annoying advertising was simply a “dick move.” (Another eastcoastism, by the way.)

“That it works on two levels, as a reference to Costolo, is a happy coincidence,” Gruber added, in an update.

“We will frequently experiment by trying new things, adding new features, and being bold in the product decisions we make,” Twitter’s Doug Bowman, aka @stop, said in the blog post. “After testing a feature and evaluating its merits, if we learn it doesn’t improve the user experience or serve our mission, we’ll remove that feature.”